Tag: IB Business & Management

I.B. BUSINESS.

Unlike the HL internal assessment in IB business, which emphasises collecting primary data, the emphasis in the SL internal assessment is on collecting secondary data. Primary data is data that you collect yourself, using interviews, surveys, questionnaires etc. Secondary data is data that someone else has already collected or assembled for you. Examples are business reports, articles in the news media, information on company websites and Annual Reports. For this reason, the SL internal assessment is quicker and easier to do, because you have the data all there at your fingers tips, as it were.

Here is the assessment criteria for the supporting documents:-

Criteria A: Supporting Documents

A number of things need to be noted here.

Don’t select documents that are more than 3 years old

Ensure documents are translated into the language of submission, if they are written in a different language.

Include a minimum of 3, and a maximum of 5 documents. And don’t exceed the maximum!

They must be relevant, in-depth and must ‘provide a range of different views’.

By ‘range of different views’ it means that the documents must illustrate different view points and opinions about the company or issue / problem that you are studying. So, for example, if all your data sources come from the company itself i.e. are all internal to the company, such as Annual Reports, marketing documents, the company website etc. then it is likely that you are going to be reading data that is biased in favour of the company and it’s activities. This may hinder your ability to really objectively analyse and evaluate the company, its strategies and the issue that you are studying.

So it’s important to get documents that are not just internal to the company, but also ones that are external as well. These should be more balanced and critical of the company.

Prior to my students starting their research, I give them this document to help them collect a wide range of data sources (see below). I ask them to collect as many different internal and external sources of data as they can on the company or problem / issue they are studying prior to them writing their internal assessment.

IB Business & Management.

The Coursework Research Question – The Importance of ‘Focus’.

One of the first things that you will have to do when starting your business coursework is to choose a good, well focused research question (r.q.) . If you choose an inappropriate or unfocused r.q., you will be handicapped from the beginning. The word count for the HL coursework is only 2000 words (excluding the Research Question and Research Proposal) and for SL it is only 1500 ( for more general information on the business coursework see this page of my blog). These word counts are short, and for this reason your r.q. must not be too broad. You need to focus on one specific business (or industry) in one country, and analyse one (or possibly two) of it’s problems, strategies or decisions. See the diagram below:-

Increasingly Focused Research Question.

The above diagram illustrates some possible research questions, and their levels of focus, from unfocused at the top to much more focused on the bottom.

As you can see from the r.q. at the bottom, it looks at just one company, in one country, focusing on just one strategy. Indeed, rather than looking at just the ‘marketing strategy ( which potentially is a very broad strategy that includes a number of things such as ‘pricing’, ‘promotion’, ‘product’ and ‘place’, see the r.q. second from bottom ) it just focuses on just one of these – promotion.

Keep following this blog for more posts on the IB Business coursework.